The Confidence-Man and the Literary World of New York

Abstract

EN MELVILLE MOVED to New York in September of 1847, he was introduced to a society of literati only slightly less colorful than the knights and squires he had known in the Pacific. The beliefs and allegiances of men like Evert Duyckinck-if their critical journals are a fair record-lent something of the urgency of the chase to their discussions of the issues we now take to be among the most relevant to that period of American literary history. Men of their times, at once cognoscenti of European culture and latter-day Jonathans on such questions as literary nationalism, they warred and as often quibbled over literature in terms of religion, politics, social doctrine and-from time to time-aesthetics. And occasionally, when they deliberately obscured or tacitly ignored the issue at hand, its significance seems to become even more evident. However stimulating to the literary historian such a record may be, the literary critic finds satisfaction only seldom in such rare remarks as Poe's familiar comment in the margin, that nationality in American letters is rather a political than a literary idea-and at best a questionable point. This is not to wish that every Duyckinck had been a Poe, nor even that Melville's audience had met him with more acclaim; he often wrote his best when he was provoked, and the literati of New York were, at the very least, provocative. There are worse fates than being known as the man who lived among cannibals. Critics have turned their attention to the fact that something of the analogy that exists between his early life and Redburn, between his years in the Pacific and his earliest works, also exists between the intellectually formative years in the late 1840's and The Confidence-Man, as well as Pierre. Recently, Harrison Hay-